Pigment Flaking

Pigment flaking: picture an old barn on a country road. The red or white color seen from a distance is solid, but as you drive nearer, you see the edges curling up from sections of flaking paint, dried by the sun, failing to adhere anymore to the underlying wood.

"Her irises are so light that it is difficult to see".

Her irises-- my irises-- are like the sides of a white barn. From a distance they still seem blue. But look closer and closer and you can see the pigment flaking off.

"Your eyes have a drainage system and the pigment swirls around like in water."

This one is harder. Imagine the barn in the rain, devoid of downspouts, sheets of water running down the painted side. A fragment of paint chips off, and is carried down to the ground, running downhill with the current of water.

"They can block the drainage in the back of the eye".

The chips of paint in the gutter, overlapping and covering the drain, the water rising and flooding the street, the sidewalks, soaking the shoes of people passing by.

That should be tears, if this were a perfect metaphor, but it is not so they are not.

Imagine that barn enclosed in a globe, filled with water. A snow globe, with an iconic old barn as its central figure. But that doesn't work either; where does the water need to go, except to circulate forever with suspended glitter?

Something is being produced that should drain away. Flakes of pigment are blocking that drain.

I know what my eyes produce: memories.

As the blue pigment flakes off my irises, leaving them almost transparent, it holds memories on the screen of my eyes. Memories that should flow away, and won't and cannot. Memories that will blind me in time.